Gitta Sereny, the daughter of a 'passionate Anglophile Hungarian' grew up in Vienna, but went to school in England.

In 1934, returning home, her train broke down in Nuremberg, and at the age of 11, she found herself an unwitting spectator at a Nazi Party rally. More disturbing still, she found herself entranced by the spectacle of totalitarian power.

In a sense she has devoted the rest of her life to grappling with the horror of that excitement and, more specifically, with the horror of the Third Reich and the scars it has left on the German psyche. This collection of a lifetime's journalism about many aspects of Nazism is, at one level, just that - picked-up pieces. However, the obsessive nature of Sereny's technique, most famously displayed in her remorseless investigation of Albert Speer, gives the volume a natural unity and coherence.

Here, then, are her reports on Kurt Waldheim, John Demjanjuk, Hans Jurgen Syberberg, Leni Riefenstahl and many others: crooks, swindlers, secretaries, collaborationists and death camp commanders.

Sereny says that her deeper purpose is to understand what it is 'that leads human beings so often and so readily to embrace violence and amorality', but what will strike many readers is the dismal quality of the men and women who played such an important role in the imposition of atrocity on the Germans and their neighbours.

As an alternative history of the Third Reich, this volume could hardly be bettered.